Subject: Why??? Date: 12/28/2018 Time: 08:26 AM EDT Your letter to the bugman: Why in the hell do you have a site called What’s That Bug when you don’t want to answer people asking exactly that? Pointless, flippant and plain rude. There’s nothing humorous about people suffering. I see you aren’t shy asking for donations. How about you educate yourself and actually answer people asking, “What’s that bug?” Before asking for money. Your Name: Mason Your Email: mksusan7@gmail.com.

Dear Mason, It has been nearly two years since we have felt compelled to post a Nasty Reader Award, so you will probably be thrilled to learn that you are lucky #13. We had a challenging December, with some technical difficulties occurring that prevented us from doing any posting for more than an entire week, and we can honestly say that we don’t believe we have gone that long without posting in many years. Most days we try to make at least a few new posts, and we averaged more than three per day for 2018, though that average is considerably lower than our average of more than six new posts per day in 2010. That said, we do answer letters, but our tiny staff is not able to answer every request we receive. We offer a free service on the internet, which is not that common, and we make no apologies for accepting donations from grateful readers. As of now, we have 26,519 unique postings on our site, most of which represent our tiny editorial staff answering the question “What’s That Bug?” To you we say “Bug Off.”

Subject: Angry moth in northern Nevada Location: Northern Nevada January 10, 2017 3:56 pm Hey asshole, if you spent as much time crafting mocking replies to your so-called “””nasty readers””” as you do researching what species the bugs are, you wouldn’t HAVE any angry clients. Take my email adress OFF my submission, I dont need more spam. I dont care what your “terms and conditions” are. Signature: Daniel Marlos

Lettered Sphinx Moth: Deidamia inscriptum

Dear Trashface, AKA Daniel Marlos impersonator, We were so stunned by your virulent letter with its inflammatory image that there is no question in our mind that you deserve the Nasty Reader tag, and we strongly suspect that you are deliberately vying for that coveted award. Your efforts have paid off. Your assessment that we spend much more time researching submissions to our site than we do “crafting mocking replies” to our “so-called “”nasty readers””” is absolutely correct. Since your letter is only the 12th Nasty Reader we have tagged in our 15 years of running What’s That Bug?, a site currently with 23,437 unique postings, only .051% of our responses were to readers deemed by us to be nasty. We don’t believe we have that many angry readers, and we can deal with those odds as we learned long ago that “you can’t please all the people all the time.” That stated, we are ready to get down to identifying your Sphinx Moth from the family Sphingidae, and trust us when we say we spent a great deal more time with that task than we did crafting our first paragraph in response to you. We could not locate your moth in the Sphingidae of Nevada, the Sphingidae of California, nor the Sphingidae of Idaho pages of Bill Oehlke’s awesome Sphingidae of the Americas site. At that point we contacted Lepidopterist Julian Donahue who confirmed the family Sphingidae, but neither he nor Eric Eaton were able to provide a species name. We wrote to Bill Oehlke and he provided us with the correct identification.

Bill Oehlke identifies Deidamia inscriptumDaniel, It is Deidamia inscriptum. I have not seen any previous reports from Nevada, but it is known for sure from eastern Texas all the way to the east coast so it may well be in Nevada and just hasn’t been documented there before. It is also possible that it was inadvertently imported into Nevada as a pupa in soil at base of some potted plant that was transported across state lines. Maybe a storm with high winds brought it to Nevada. Maybe it is a hoax. You could just indicate it is Deidamia inscriptum which is not native to Nevada. Do you have a more precise location in Nevada? The Sphingidae are strong fliers and can get energy from flower nectar or fermenting fruit, so it might even have flown there, but it appears to be a fresh specimen, so my guess is it is a wrong location or an accidental import. Maybe it came in the soil as pupa in a potted Christmas plant. Hope you had a great holiday season and have a great new year. Time flies. Bill

Thanks to Bill Oehlke’s identification, we were able to locate the Lettered Sphinx on the Sphingidae of the Americas site, and we learned that it “flies from New Hampshire south to northern Florida and southern Alabama (Houston County (JS)); west to Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. The specimen type locality is Indiana. It also flies in southern Ontario and is occasionally seen in southern Quebec” and “In Greek literature, Deidamia was one of Lycomedes’ daughters, and she bore a son, Neoptolemus, for Achilles. The species name ‘inscriptum’ MAY ? have been chosen for the parallel ‘lines’ on the forewings, suggesting lines of script.” Now that we have determined that you are in fact among the minute percentage of our readership that might be considered “angry clients” that we refer to as Nasty Readers, and that the identity of your moth is Deidamia inscriptum, the mystery remaining for us is how did it stray so far from its typical range? Bill Oehlke has offered some plausible reasons, and we don’t want to discount that you may have been trying to stump us as well as to taunt us, and that perhaps this image was taken someplace other than Nevada. We will most likely never know. Congratulations again on being awarded with our 12th Nasty Reader designation. P.S. We will not be posting your “email adress” as we do NOT post email addresses, so we are not responsible for your spam.

Trashface writes back and fesses up to internet plagiarism as well as being angry and a poor writerFirst of all, you need to grow a thicker skin if you get offended by mean emails. And secondly, don’t be a smart-ass. You know very well that I meant to say “if you spent as much time identifying bugs as you do crafting mocking replies…etc.” But clearly wits aren’t your forte. A cleverer person than you would’ve realized that I just Google image searched “bug on middle finger” to find an offensive yet hilariously topical picture to send to you. I stole the pic from Flickr, which you probably think is deplorable too. Congrats on wasting time identifying a bug that I didn’t even take a photo of. Bugger off, bug man

Ed. Note: Far be it from us to assume what our readers mean to write when they send in inquiries. We take their writing for face value and we do not correct their errors. We had no luck locating the FlickR posting where this image was allegedly pilfered as we want to request permission from the actual photographer to keep it on our site.

From Our Facebook Fans:

Jeff Lanterman January 12 at 10:56am Did he think that was funny? Sometimes I don’t understand people.

Sean Gaukroger January 12 at 12:59pm Huh? Today’s Sphinx moth brought to you by the letter “F”?

Lisa Phillips January 12 at 2:54pm Thank you for the identification & sorry this person is rude. I myself look forward to your posts. Keep up your fascinating work 🐛

Heather Christensen January 12 at 3:49pm We love your posts! I have not yet submitted any critters needing identification, but my son and I always keep our eye out. This guy is a clown, and definitely deserves the coveted “Nasty Reader” title. Keep up the great work, we love you guys. 🐌🐛🐜🐝🐞🕷🦂

Ed. Note: It was not until after we prepared a response for this query that we noticed what we consider to be a rude (as well as incoherent) retort to our automated response. Though it seems ? was upset at not receiving the requested product, we did not feel that our free internet service should have received such a terse comment, hence we are tagging this posting with the Nasty Reader Award, despite it being not quite as toxic as some other postings with that tag. Perhaps the original product order contained similar grammatical errors and truncated sentences which resulted in shipping the wrong product.

Subject: identification Location: bellingham wa May 9, 2016 7:39 am I ordered a REAL LIVE BLUE PHILENOR PIPEVINE SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY CHRYSALIS PUPA COCOON. in the description it said the pupa would be brown or green but this is what they sent. do you have any idea what this is? Signature: ?

Our Automated Response: Thank you for submitting your identification request. Please understand that we have a very small staff that does this as a labor of love. We cannot answer all submissions (not by a long shot). But we’ll do the best we can!

Why do you say you will if you do not? I would not of given my email address if.I would of known that you don’t answer back

Ed. Comment: After reading the first three comments that arrived, we decided to upgrade this posting to the Nasty Reader tag.

Subject: Comments, Responses, & Sad Backpedaling January 24, 2016 4:35 am Hello, I am a biologist and I work for the Government. I mention this only to reveal my familiarity with reading disturbing and mysterious things. I have been on your site several times hoping to see something interesting. Tonight I did, though not topically expected. Areas now perfectly clear are: 1) Nothing here of more knowledge or with more information than a public high school text book. 2) That you care. 3)You attempt to deflect this by mockery and wildly unwarranted superiority. 4) That this site does more than babysit its curator’s undernourished egos. On reading a post , a schoolyard comment from another reader, your curiously condescending and marginalizing reply, the rebuke .. and wait for it…the transparent cowardice of your denial. Perhaps you overlooked a small detail. Tiny detail really..its just that you typed words on the page. Hands in pockets and think words really, really hard next time? Just a thought. It’s not too late for this to morph into a catalyst for positive change. Love yourself a little more and understand that cruelty is a game played in shallow water. Ultimately you will lose. The rest of us can clearly see your feet. Peace. Out. Signature: Amanda

Dear Amanda, We do consider this website and our life both to be works in progress and we like to think that we have evolved considerably since we first began writing What’s That Bug? in 1998. From the very beginning, we have maintained that we have no credentials to provide scientific information and we have always strived for our site to be a pop culture site that is accessible to the average person rather than to be a true scientific endeavor targeting intellectual specialists. That there is “nothing here of more knowledge or with more information than a public high school text book” is not a problem in our mind because there is no requirement that the web browsing public possesses a college degree. Many children visit our site and a high school text book would be quite educational. Out of concern for younger readers, we try our best to keep a clean site, so we do not use vulgar language.

We always defer to true experts, so we question your allegations of our “wildly unwarranted superiority.” With that stated, your comment has us a bit confused. There is some praise there, but it is overshadowed by your criticism of our editorial stance. We are well aware that once content enters cyberspace, it gains a life of its own and it is nearly impossible to rescind, so we actually do carefully consider our words prior to hitting the publish button. We are not infallible and we do not apologize for our ego. It can be argued that anyone who enters public life in any way, be it running a blog or running for public office, has an inflated ego.

Your comment seems to refer to a specific posting with “a schoolyard comment from another reader” and our “transparent cowardice” and what you perceive as “cruelty” on our part, but without a real citation to correspond to your criticism on how we have chosen to run our own public site, we can neither justify our stance nor clarify or defend the meaning of what we have written. Clearly your background in biology and your position as a government employee has prepared to to analyze our psyche. In our opinion, your focus on our use of occasional sarcasm vastly overshadows the public service we provide free of charge.

Elise from Facebook Comments. January 24 at 6:21pm Love your page, and appreciate that you tried to interpret that sometimes incoherent comment. The poster seems to lack both a sense of humor and a mastery of basic sentence structure. Keep doing what you do.

Ed. Note: Though it is nowhere near as virulent as other nasty emails we have received, we have decided this posting needs to be tagged with our Nasty Reader Award nonetheless. Perhaps we are being overly sensitive, but the followup communication from M R just rubbed us the wrong way by implying that our personal (and originally unposted) response was not sufficient. First, the original email we received did not even include a question, and by all appearances, including the use of abbreviations, this was a hasty submission. We are a free internet service and we do not have the time to do extensive research on every request we receive. The image is out of focus, and it is not attractive. We choose requests with catchy subject lines, attractive images, interesting anecdotes or rare sightings for posting purposes because we find them more interesting, and we believe our readership will also find them more interesting. We responded to MR the same day the submission was made, and it took MR more than a day to put a species name to the Cicada. Exact species identifications are frequently time consuming, as MR learned, and we had no clue from the information we received that a species name was even desired. Granted, our identification was general, but it was correct. Getting what seems to be a snotty reply that “I figured that a bug id ‘What’s That Bug’ would have at least figured out that it was a Cicada” seemed totally unnecessary and crafted to demean our site. So, after a hiatus of more than three years, we are finally awarding our Ninth Nasty Reader Award. We are also linking to BugGuide for information on Neotibicen dorsatus, the Bush Cicada.

Ed. Note: A mere ten days after making this post, it quickly rose to the fifth “most liked” posting on our site.

Ed. Note: We haven’t awarded a Nasty Reader Award in quite some time since most folks who write to us are polite and quite understanding that our small staff is unable to respond to every question we receive. This morning we happened upon this flurry of emails from Alexis Crowell, that came within three hours of one another. Seems Alexis is demanding instant gratification and furthermore, (S)he has deplorable grammar. Additionally, U.S.A. is a very broad location when it comes to trying to determine the identify of many insects that have a very localized range. Further research into the matter revealed that Alexis did not even take the photographs, but rather pilfered them from other websites. With that said, we are unable to even respond to this rude query with any accuracy. It also appears that despite the poor grammar and spelling, Alexis has referred to our staff with a derogatory sexual orientation slur in the final correspondence that occurred a scant two hours and 45 minutes after the initial email. Seems Alexis is not only rude, but a person who demands instant gratification. For all of the above reasons, we are pleased to award Alexis Crowell of the U.S.A. as our latest Nasty Reader Award recipient.

Subject: are they rare? Location: U.S.A August 14, 2012 3:08 pm dear bugman,is the pink inchworm rare or is it not that rare. is there not that many inch worms? Signature: sinnceraly, Alexis Crowell

Ed Note: Our immediate automated responseSent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 3:08 PMSubject: Identification Request: are they rare?Thank you for submitting your identification request. Please understand that we have a very small staff that does this as a labor of love. We cannot answer all submissions (not by a long shot). But we’ll do the best we can!

Alexis Crowell alexisleecrowell@yahoo.com 3:19 PM (18 hours ago) dear bugman it is ok you cant just try we are really curious about this unknown bug.

Alexis Crowell alexisleecrowell@yahoo.com 5:10 PM (17 hours ago) JUST ANSWER US PLEASE I AM CRYIN RIGHT NOW AND I HAVE BEEN STARING AT THE COMPUTER!

Alexis, Our online submission form clearly states: “By submitting an identification request and/or photo(s), you give WhatsThatBug.com permission to use your words and image(s) on their website and other WhatsThatBug.com publications. Also, you swear that you either took the photo(s) yourself or have explicit permission from the photographer or copyright holder to use the image.” Both of the images you have submitted have been pilfered from other internet websites, most likely without permission which is a copyright violation. One image came from http://www.dailypress2.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=111815 and the other is a photo credited to Dave Green posted on http://daylight44.net/pinkinch.html which can be accessed by clicking the Photo of Pink Inchworm link. You have plagiarized the work of other photographers and submitted them using our online form that specifically indicates that you have taken the photos or you have permission to use the photos. Additionally, your flurry of emails in rapid succession ending in an incorrectly spelled sexual orientation slur has gained you the distinction of being awarded the Nasty Reader Award as well as a feature on our scrolling announcement bar. The Nasty Reader Award is a distinction we have not had the pleasure to award in over two and a half years, which is an indication that most people who write to us are polite and well mannered. Please search elsewhere for information on Pink Inchworms. Responding to you is not worth any more of our time which is quite precious to us.

Ed. Note: excerpt from another response. … so sorry you had to award your Nasty Reader award … what a jerk ! the rest of us really love what you are doing and appreciate your time, efforts, and your willingness to share your knowledge. Donna